It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States. 

But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model. 

If this is a safe space, I will admit here that at one time I was around one-third vulnerable to such arguments. I don’t mean the part about Trump being a force for progressive change in any sense, even if entirely by accident, since that was obviously and hilariously wrong, not to mention based on the same “enemy of my enemy” pretzel logic that produced the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. But on the level of a sophomore-seminar intellectual exercise, I could understand why self-appointed contrarians like Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald saw Trump as a disruptive force who might upend the softcore imperialism of the previous three or four decades, which had led to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hegemony of corporate capital. 

You didn’t have to be an unregenerate Leninist or an online troll or a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative (or all three at once!) to be momentarily seduced by Trump’s “America First” nonsense. Disgruntled Americans of all varieties voted for Trump by the millions, based in large part on his populist, isolationist rhetoric. Maureen Dowd’s notorious “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” column from 2016 should be inscribed above the gates of one of the lower circles of hell as a permanent warning to know-it-all media commentators. 

It was, of course, immensely helpful to Trump’s agenda of fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies that we experienced the failings of mainstream U.S. foreign policy all over again during the strange interregnum of Joe Biden’s presidency, with its pious invocation of a “rules-based order” — where the rules are set by America, of course — and its theological commitment to a now-entirely-imaginary “two-state solution” in the Middle East. Several things can be said in retrospect about Biden’s fateful embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tel Aviv tarmac after the Oct. 7 attacks: It was an authentic and heartfelt gesture, it was a grievous political error and it paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe now widely perceived as genocidal. 

(GPO/ Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images) Joe Biden is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion Airport, Oct. 18, 2023.

Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value, and has also dispensed with the contradictory or two-faced rhetoric of the Biden years. There’s no more talk of universal human rights or the spread of democracy. The fundamental logic of Trumpian policy is cynicism all the way down: We don’t care about any of those things and we never did. To paraphrase Stephen Miller, surely the most instrumental figure in the Trump White House, the only thing that matters is power. 

Maybe we should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration, since Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft surrounding him. (Miller strikes me as a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels.)

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As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic, not to mention increasingly dangerous. Trump’s dance of death with the Iranian regime might have a comical aspect if the lives of many thousands of people and the future of the global order were not at stake. By goading the president into restarting the war for the third time (by my count), the new roster of hardline leaders in Tehran, at least for now, have strengthened both their domestic control and their international reputation. It’s difficult to imagine, in fact, how Trump and his ludicrous cast of advisers could possibly have screwed this up worse than they did. (D.C. rumors suggest that high-testosterone “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth will ultimately be compelled to walk the plank over this fiasco.)

Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues. Trump has never given up on his dream of seizing or annexing Greenland, but it was always more like an extortion scheme or a real estate scam than a military threat. Roughly the same applies to his improvised plan to rebuild Gaza as a Trumpified new Riviera, which took even Netanyahu by surprise and was never likely to escape the uncanny valley of AI fantasy. 

I’m inclined to feel similar about this week’s reports that Seb Gorka, an unhinged far-right free radical with some sort of roving-ninja role in the Trump White House, is urging a military assault against Islamist militia groups in Mali, a West African nation with complicated internal dynamics and no relationship whatever to U.S. national security. Again, this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups instead of humanitarian and healthcare NGOs. (Read this ProPublica report for more on that.)

Things have truly gotten dark if we’re looking to JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the proverbial adults in the room, managing the worst impulses of their increasingly disinhibited and incapacitated boss. I don’t know which of those two geniuses signed off on the reported nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which may fall apart, goddess willing, under the weight of its impromptu idiocy and the fact that literally no one thinks it’s a good idea. Mohammed bin Salman, that kingdom’s journalist-murdering leader, is roughly the last person in the world who should have access to nuclear materials. If this deal goes through, it could rank among the very worst of Trump’s foreign policy blunders. Of course there’s still time for more. 

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate. 

That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.

During a combative appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth asked for another $67 billion in supplemental funding for the rest of the budget year. But the shock of that request paled in comparison to another number. Hegseth estimated that the Iran war has cost $37.5 billion so far, far higher than the $30 billion figure the Pentagon only recently gave to lawmakers. 

That number is astounding on its own, but according to most sources and experts, it significantly lowballs the war’s true cost, which continues to mount. NBC News reported that, according to internal estimates by the Defense Department peg the amount at $80 billion to $100 billion. 

It’s not unusual for administrations of both parties to bulk up the Pentagon budget, although the Republicans have always been the most passionate about it. But this is beyond the wildest dreams of Pentagons past. With all the cuts the Trump administration has made to everything else in the government, you’d think they would be a little less greedy. But that’s not how they roll. In Trump’s first term, military spending was profligate, and this time it’s a free-for-all.

Hegseth is basically asking for an unlimited supply of money to finance an extremely unpopular war and such “generational investments” like the “Trump-class battleships,” otherwise known as the Golden Fleet. We needn’t worry that they are being irresponsible, though. They are committed to rooting out “woke” wherever they find it, and that will surely save a few bucks somewhere down the road.

When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.” In this the secretary was correct. Biden requested military funding for Ukraine through emergency supplemental requests. But the Trump administration has created an unprecedented innovation. In partnership with MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, they are trying to get it passed through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered but is subject to ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who can strip the provision if it is determined to be non-budgetary.

The U.S. is running through its supplies of expensive precision-guided munitions and air-defense interceptors at record pace in the Iran war, and there are concerns that reduced inventories are going to affect readiness in case the country is drawn into a war it didn’t choose. Hegseth, though, would not cop to that, insisting instead that all was well — and that the Pentagon just needed more cash to fix up the depleted military Biden left them.

House Republicans have proven more pliant. On Wednesday, by a margin of 216 to 212, they passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill to cover some of what the White House is requesting, adding some juicy extras for artificial intelligence and other tech-bro projects led by the private-equity types who are running much of the Pentagon these days. According to Guardian, one of them, former Uber executive Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering who is an aggressive promoter of AI, made a profit of up to $24 million by selling a private investment he held in xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, earlier this year. (In March 2025, Michael declared the value of his stake at between $500,000 and $1 million.) Since the company isn’t public, no one is quite sure how he came to own the shares or who he sold them to, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the defense department entered into two separate contracts with xAI before Michael sold his shares. 

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He’s not the only one who appears to be milking the military-industrial complex. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s eldest sons, have a portfolio of tech companies that are raking in billions from the Pentagon. These are not businesses with which the Trumps have any experience, and the partnerships and investments have all been initiated since their father became president the second time. Don Jr. has said publicly that he works with Hegseth to steer more contracts to drone manufacturers, of which he is a beneficiary. Both brothers are heavily involved with firms that have contracts all over the Pentagon. They insist, though, there’s no conflict of interest and no one in the department has even considered favoritism.

As usual, Hegseth behaved like a teenage bully during the Senate hearing. He argued with senators, blamed Biden and insisted that America has won the war in Iran while simultaneously requesting many more billions to win it. Since the GOP is attempting to push this supplemental package through using reconciliation, they won’t need Democrats to pass it, so one can probably expect that he’ll get what he wants. The firehose of money flowing to the Pentagon and all the insiders who are making massive bank from it isn’t going to dry up any time soon. 

Hegseth ended the week with a gratuitous gesture to his commander in chief, who spent a good part of his time explaining that the 18 deaths in the Iran war are nothing compared to all the deaths in previous wars. To make Trump feel better, Hegseth removed from the tally four troops who were killed in renewed fighting, bringing the official death toll back down to 14. Military officials told the New York Times that “one reason behind the change was . . . because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Nonetheless, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four fallen soldiers’ remains and concocted a story to burnish his war lust. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

Sure they did.

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